Well, it’s catch 22 for the committee isn’t it. If you’re a scientist, you’re going to want to circle the wagons. If you’re a politician, again, you’re going to want to circle the wagons (supporting AGW is policy). If you’re neither, nobody is going to listen to what you have to say in any case because you cannot engage in argumentum ad verecundiam, which strangely is now no longer considered a formal fallacy.

A further coat of Whitewash was applied covering up the latest bird rear end deposits, Stringer asked the best questions.

Muir was caught out on the deletion of the emails as he did not want to get involved in quasi-judicial questioning (must give him flashbacks to the Scottish Parliment building inquiry when the boot was on someone elses foot) so cleared them but only because he looked at the bigger questions.

I enjoyed being there – alongside Bob Ward and a big team of supporters off the bus from UEA. Every MP this time I felt wanted to prove their worth and independence of the ‘machine’. Not that they nailed every line of inquiry by any means. But Montford, McIntyre, McKitrick, Holland and Keenan were all in the frame this time – and their centrality to the debate was clear for all to see. About time.

It was a woeful performance by all three men. How Muir Russell justified not asking direct questions about FOI and deletions is beyond me. If certain actions or emails implied Jones had broken the law, so be it. Might that not be relevant to the trust that has been lost through Climategate?

And what is the relevance of a paper being published by a journal edited by a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Davies? It’s the content that matters. Looking at the MPs I didn’t sense any of that stuff washed with them, when it might have in the past. They were much better informed than before.

I have no idea if they will do a report of their own. But the sense that our lawmakers are finally waking up to how bad some of the IPCC ‘science’ has been was palpable. What they do about it … that is hard.

My impression was that not just Mr Stringer but the Tory and LibDem MPs were also well informed, asked pertinent questions and, while allowing the trio of Muir Russell, Acton and Davies to waffle on, they did not let themselves be bamboozled.

As the names of Messrs Holland, Keenan, McKittrick, Steve McIntyre and Montford were mentioned by the MPs, I could not help thinking that they probably read, at least, andy Montford’s report on the whitewash reviews – and some, especially Mr Stringer, seem to have delved into this blog as well.

The expressions on the faces of some MPs, while one or the other of three trio waffled on relentlessly, were evidence that they did not buy the whitewash on offer.

Will there be a report?
Probably.

Will the present government make use of it?
Who knows!

But – I was encouraged to see that the MPs belonging to the governing coalition were mightily unimpressed by the trio’s efforts. As these are all ‘new’ to this parliament, having only been elected in May, I’d assume that they won’t as yet be reverential enough towards their own government, and will make representations which might hopefully lead to ‘savings’, i.e. cuts for CAGW projects in the budget next year.

Agree with Viv Evans on all of that. While it’s fresh in the mind, the moment I most felt “clean bowled” was the new MP (sorry, no subtitles in the room itself) who asked Russell why he didn’t do as the previous committee had recommended and hold all interviews in the open. There was no good reason. Stringer took on some of the more detailed points, including the views of Professor Kelly being unrepresented but highly relevant to the issue of whether the science was any good. The committee has plenty to put in writing if they so choose.

MP:
One of the things that the previous comittee recommended was that these interviews took place in publlic. Why didn’t you follow that recommendation?

Muir Russell:
Well, for the reason that I’ve implied in what I said that what we wanted to do was to get the referenced scientific information down and findable, rather than having to rely on what people might say on the spur of the moment and having to go through the whole process of writing it up, checking it, modifying it, and then going and finding the information. That’s a perfectly valid technique for lots of other things, but we thought that this was so scientific, so objective, so much rooted in the references to what people had actually done as scientists, and whether the things that were complained of had actually influenced what they had done as scientists, that you really had to get after it by going to the record, and this is was the way we chose to do it.

Where Muir Russell says “we thought that this was so scientific, so objective”, he is referring by “this” to his team’s technique of writing up the interviews, as he’d established, without apparently checking and correcting them.

Davies inidcated that teh Royal Society had been sent copies of the papers on March 4 and that he emaild asking for a statement of approval on the 12th. He also says that that Email was the one replied to in 20 minutes.

He also in reply to one of Sringer’s questions that the list was supplied to the panel on the 10 which is two days before the RS indicated tehir approval of the list

In reply to questiosn about contentious papers not being on the list, he indicated that the same topics were covered in papers which were on the list.

That seems to be the UEA case about the list.

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However I could not quite understand Davies’ answer as to who created the list. Apparently Jones and others were consulted but they did not have decision-making authority. I think that Davies indicated that he and someone else actually made the decision but the answer was so lenghty and convoluted thagt I am not quite sure of that.

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On the deletion of Email issue, I especially liked the linguistic discussion of the difference on menaing between “incite” and “attempt”.